Guild Leadership Archives - Page 47 of 108

A Real Monk

October 23, 2014 by Belghast

Being Sickly Sucks

My life story is pretty simple, and can be pretty much summed up by my body repeatedly betraying me. I was born with a primary immune system issue, which is far from “boy in the bubble” territory, but mostly means I have a “lazy” immune system. Essentially all of my antibodies and defense mechanisms hang out saying “these guys aren’t so bad” until finally one of these foreign actors torches the place, and forces them to fight back and repel whatever bad things invaded my body. Throwing a sucker punch into the works I have some pretty severe asthma and allergies. More often than not what starts as allergies or an undefended against cold ends up triggering the asthma and locking me down.

Right now my lungs are betraying me and since yesterday afternoon have been struggling to breathe. I am doing the normal “take breathing treatments every few hours” thing, which is helping but just considerably slower than I would like it to. By the time I went to bed last night I was actually feeling almost human. Waking up this morning however my body seems to have rebelled against me once more. At this point I am uncertain if this is just a cold or something deeper, but in any case the initial treatment is the same, rest and medication. I am so ready for nanites to exist, I will gladly embrace our robot overlords if they bring with them the ability to fix my dumb malfunctioning body. Maybe I can have like cool cybernetic parts too… in the future I will totally be Adam Jensen.

Nightmare Tides

I was reminded yesterday by my friend RowanBlaze that it was the launch day for Nightmare Tides. I managed to get in for a bit but didn’t stick around terribly long for a number of reasons. The first was that the servers were really populated, like can’t engage a single mob without having a swarm of players on it with you. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because it means that the expansion as a whole seems to be pretty well received. The second was that after spending about thirty minutes doing “bag maintenance” and removing all of the old Storm Legion quests from my log, I honestly just felt drained. I was afterall not feeling amazing in the first place, and when you combine this with the fact that the once awesome build that Pkudude helped me find in the first place isn’t quite as awesome as it once was… I just lacked the oomph to go out onto the forums and find whatever it is that the latest leveling build happens to be.

The thing I did mess around with however is the new Minions system. So far I am a fan, other than I have no clue how to actually earn adventurine. The idea is that Minions are mini-pets with a purpose. My biggest disappoint is that not all mini-pets are minions… and not all minions are mini-pets. This aspect of the system is deeply confusing and they would have been far better serviced if they had simply done what Blizzard did and assign attributes to ALL existing mini-pets. That aside it is a fun little mini-game where you send your pet out on missions. The more missions you run the better xp it gains… and I would assume at some point you start to unlock more dangerous missions as a result. I got a nice jellyfish minion as part of my preorder (that also happens to double as an in game companion) but there are a number of basic mini-pets that you can pick up for 1 plat each. The other way you can obtain them is either by buying randomized packs… or by spending the Nightmare Tides zone currency on individual ones.

Admittedly I have been doing a pretty poor job of keeping track on the progress of this expansion. An awesome reader of mine hooked me up early on with beta access, and I spent quite a bit of time poking around the first zone. I did not however delve too deep into the systems because I wanted to spoil the experience as little as possible. Mostly I was trying to decide if I wanted to pre-order or not, and I enjoyed myself enough to throw some more money Trion’s way. Now I am trying to figure out all the things I happened to miss. If nothing else Minions are an interesting diversion to the leveling process as the user interface has made it super simple to hop in and out of the Minion screen, notifying you when your current missions is complete in the same place the dungeon finder tools show up. Since I am essentially done with Destiny for the time being, I might end up streaming some Nightmare Tides leveling this weekend during the Extra-Life marathon.

A Real Monk

The bulk of my evening I spent watching television and working on leveling my Pugilist in Final Fantasy XIV. I have this crazy goal of reaching 50 on all combat and crafting classes by the Spring 2015 release of Heavensward, and for some reason of late I have hung on working on the pugilist. I think in part because this is my last Disciple of War class to level… at least until next week when the Rogue/Ninja is released. For the longest time I just could not get into the pugilist, but lately I feel like I have finally gotten into the “rhythm” of playing it… or what everyone refers to as “the dance”. When I was working up my guide I declared Monk being less positional dependant than the Dragoon… and in a way this is absolutely true. Monk attacks will still land and qualify for the next step in a combo regardless of where you are in relation to the target. Dragoons on the other hand, the combo will not continue unless the attack was performed from the right position.

Saying that however leaves out the fact that a monk that is NOT doing positional attacks… is a monk that is completely ineffective and might as well just be auto attacking. There seems to be a massive damage output difference between keeping up all of your stacks and dancing around the target to just standing there and beating on it from one place. The thing I like the most about the monk so far is that the position attacks seem to be eaiser to land that for the dragoon. The Dragoon attacks have a lot of lead up time to the attack, and notoriously your tank is going to twitch the target at exactly the wrong moment… making it so that Heavy Thrust for example doesn’t land. With a monk this never seems to happen… or at the very least it is not as crippling of an event as you can still continue going to your next attack. If you miss a Heavy Thrust… you have to Heavy Thrust again… until finally one lands.

So I am happy to finally get what people like about playing the Monk. Last night I ran a really horrible Halatali for my daily roulette. If you are a Gladiator tank out there, please for the love of god do not use Riot Blade. We tried to explain to this tank three for four times exactly what he needed to do to hold aggro. However he almost willfully ignored us. At one point I actually voted to abandon the party after one of our dps bailed on us. Unfortunately the NEW dps didn’t understand why we were trying to abandon party and voted it down. After that I ran a few instances of Totorak and a few of Haukke after I graduated up into that dungeon. Finally near the end of the night I dinged 30 and was able to complete my monk quest. Now I am no longer a pugilist but a proper monk, and finally have some decent AOE capabilities. Actually looking forward to finishing leveling this job and getting it geared out.

#FFXIV #Rift #NightmareTides

Heavensward

October 20, 2014 by Belghast

Fan Festival Was Amazing

Watch live video from finalfantasyxiv on TwitchThere have been several community events that I have watched over the years for the various games I have been into. I’ve watched SOE Live, and Blizzcon… so I guess I was expecting the Fan Festival to feel pretty much the same, but in the end it felt considerably different. With Blizzcon there is always the feeling that the folks from Blizzard are imposed upon to be up in front of the fans, especially during the question and answer sessions. SOE Live on the other hand feels more like a gathering of loyal fans to a long running franchise, but even it felt different. When one of the members of the FFXIV team was on stage, they were practically glowing with excitement at being there. If you think about it, I guess it makes sense… because this is a game that was so bad during the 1.0 launch that they simply could not charge money for it. These team members have through a monumental effort turned the listing ship around and not only stopped it from sinking but made it the second most successful subscription MMO on the market.

Watch live video from finalfantasyxiv on TwitchI think it goes deeper than that however. Each time a developer of any stripe was on stage, they were almost vibrating with excitement about talking to the fans. Naoki Yoshida aka “Yoshi P” the producer of Final Fantasy XIV and the man mostly credited for the games resurrection… was only actually scheduled to be on stage a few times. However he ended up sitting in on damned near every panel because you could just tell that he was having a blast at the festival. The man however that needs the lions share of the credit for pulling off this event as smoothly as it ran is Michael Christopher “Koji” Fox. Not only was he a constant bundle of enthusiasm over all matters lore, but he spent the majority of the conference live translating for every dev panel. This is a pretty monumental feat, and his localization and lore panel is one that everyone should see. Right now the twitch stream are these two 10 hour blocks of video… but I am hoping that these get broken up into individual panels.

Since the release of the game my friends and I have talked about just how awesome the localization and quest writing is for this game, and come to find out… that is almost entirely the work of Koji Fox. The Japanese version of FFXIV apparently lacks almost all of the flavor that the English version of the game has. During the Lore panel they gave a few examples of a Japanese quest that was extremely utilitarian contrasted against one of ours that is all about amazingly bad puns. I feel like the game would not have been nearly as successful were it not for all of this diligent work during the localization process. Apparently it has been noticed, and the Japanese version is going to be much more closely related to style of the English client from this point on. It almost sounded like things would even start in the English client and get translated to Japanese, but I might have misunderstood that bit. In any case Koji for me at least is the reason why this game is so damned sticky.

Heavensward

It is safe to say that I have not been this excited about an expansion in any game since the months leading up to the Burning Crusade. There is just so much that I am looking forward to in Heavensward, not the least of which is the unlocking of Ishgard. I am in the minority among my friends but I love Coerthas, and not because I particularly like the elves that inhabit it. I love snowy climates, and Coerthas is like the king of all snowy climates because it has Dragons and the Dragoons. I am looking forward to having Ishgard be the fourth city state and am hoping that it has a grand company associated with it. I am also hoping that the political assholery that is the Coerthas quest chains… does not represent all of Ishgard as a whole. The other thing that I am completely pumped about is that we don’t have to wait over a year to see this expansion. It is currently slotted for Spring of 2015 which could mean as early as March, but potentially as late as May. This is the way that you announce an expansion… a few months before release so that your fans have enough time to get excited about it, but not so much time that it feels like it is extremely far away.

I think the thing that excites me the most about Heavensward is the potential for new classes. It has already been stated that there will be several new classes and jobs to learn with the expansion, and over the course of the Fan Festival there were a few leaks. During one of the panels Gondai the battle team developer held up a Batman shirt, verifying one of the long held rumors that we would be seeing the Dark Knight. During another panel it was leaked that Samurai would also be included. Between those two I am pretty much in heaven. Both are two of my favorite jobs from the Final Fantasy series, and you can damned well bet I will level both of them… and depending on the particulars will likely switch to Dark Knight as my primary job from that point onwards. I have loved that job since Final Fantasy IV and always found it so damned disappointing when Cecil changes to being a Paladin. My theory is that Dark Knight will be the DPS half of Warrior, and likely use Two Handed Swords… but who knows.

2.4 and Beyond

The most exciting bits for me however had nothing to do with the expansion. We have been waiting anxiously for the 2.4 patch to launch, and during the Live Letter managed to get a definitive date. Next weekend will be the London Fan Festival, and a lot of the job related information is being held back to reveal during that event. However the Tuesday immediately following London, the 28th we are getting the patch that introduces Rogue and Ninja, the Final Coil of bahamut and a bunch of Quality of life tweaks. What I am really hoping is that since Second Coil of Bahamut is getting uncapped in the amount of loot you can get from it each week… that they might be doing the same for Syrcus Tower. If nothing else the Soldiery gear should be considerably easier to get since once again they are introducing a brand new Tomestone category “Of Poetics”, which means they will be converting existing tomestones and lowering the price of items.

What is awesome is that Heavensward is not terribly far away, but they have a whole bunch of stuff that will be going into the game in the meantime. They confirmed that the Golden Saucer area will be going in during 2.5 and with it Chocobo Racing, various mini-games and the thing I am absolutely amped about… Triple Triad. This was a card game that existed as part of the Final Fantasy VIII game where you collected various cards throughout the world and dueled other Triple Triad players. The game play was extremely simple to pick up, but hard to master. I am so ready for this to be in game and expect me to duel a lot while hanging in our housing zone.

Community Spirit

There is a massive rundown on Reddit of all of the things mentioned during the Live Letter during the show yesterday. I highly suggest you check it out if you are wanting more information. Needless to say it is a super exciting time to be playing Final Fantasy XIV. If I was not already enamored with the community I would have been after the Fan Festival. The community spirit was constantly apparent when they dealt with players. There were a number of events set up for players who were attending the show to compete in. Among these was a preview of the as yet to be released Odin Primal fight. Teams of players had 15 minutes to defeat the encounter, which pretty much meant at maximum they had two attempts. The end result was not only bragging rights, but also an “I Beat Odin” shirt only available during the convention. What sprung up around it was an atmosphere of folks cheering on other teams as they tried to get their own shirts and the sharing of tips and pointers. As you talked to players that were defeated by the encounter, all they wanted to do was get back in line and figure out how to tweak their strategy for the next try.

Watching the crowds and watching folks on twitter talking about the experience… it was like the entire group was this big family. I was so happy to see that this same spirit that we seem to have on the Cactuar server, apparently exists on all other servers as well. I feel like each player that has made a home on their server, feels the same way about their own server as being truly “awesome”. The most interesting thing was listening to the various social channels in game during the event. It felt like most of the community was tuned into the festival and sharing tidbits of information they just saw. There was so much cheering over various things, not the least of which was the announcement that the Atma drop rates would be more than doubled starting in 2.4 and the Animus books themselves would be considerably cheaper after the Tomestone conversion. Folks are amped about what is coming during the next few months, and I feel like there won’t be a single dull moment until we arrive at the launch of Heavensward in the spring. If you could not already tell… I am extremely excited.

#FFXIV #Heavensward

Movies, Roulette and ArcheAge

October 17, 2014October 16, 2014 by Belghast

Little Projects

I am cheating a bit on this post, and writing it the night before I intend to post it. The plan is for us to go running around in Fayetteville tomorrow, and as such I really need not to take my normal leisurely “not having to rush to work” amount to time to write a post in the morning. Today was an insanely busy day. Right now I am taking a few days off work because it is Fall Break here in Oklahoma, and since my wife is a teacher she is out. One of the problems with living with a teacher is that you pretty much have to plan your time off around school breaks. For awhile we had planned on doing a little project, originally the intent was to rip up all of the carpet in the bedroom and paint the floor.

As time got closer to fall break we backed away from that notion, mostly because it would quite literally take all four days of this little break… and since my wife has had an insane semester so far… she really needs to take an actual break, and not a working one. Instead we opted to do a bunch of little things around the house today. Our house for starters was in massive need of a deep cleaning. Additionally we needed to gather up and take another load to Goodwill. The front closet was our key mission, and for quite some time it had been packed with coats and shoes we weren’t actually wearing any longer.

Instead we took what was useless space and turned it into something useable. Previously the closet was full with a bunch of coats that were too big for us since the weight loss. The floor was full of shoes that we longer wore, and the top was full of a bunch of board games that we had not touched since college. We kept the few things we were actually going to use from all of those categories and the end result left us a bunch of open space. We moved an 8×2 cube unit into the empty space, allowing us to store our SLR equipment on top of it, and use the other bins for scarves and such, and the lower two bins for storage of our current shoes. This left a spot on the right side that was perfect for our laptop cases, and just enough room to hang the handful of coats we decided to keep. One of the nice things is once we end up organizing something… it tends to stay organized so here is hoping that is the case with this as well.

Movies, Roulette and ArcheAge

When I finally crashed on the sofa after working on the house all day long, I logged into Final Fantasy XIV and ran my daily elite roulette with my good friend Cylladora. It went pretty smoothly and when it was finished we both logged out of FFXIV for a bit. I opted to poke my head into ArcheAge for a bit since right now it is pretty much a solo affair for me. A few days ago I applied for Greymoon the guild that everyone I know is playing the game is in… and was accepted, but I have zero clue how to actually go about getting an invite. None of the folks I know have been around since I got accepted, so I figure I will just wait until one of them is on to ask them. The guild requires folks to log into teamspeak, which seems a little odd to me. Granted I spend most of my time connected to TS, but it feels strange to require that folks just log in out of course rather than for them doing so with a purpose.

I am still slowly working my way through the content, and I am closing in on 22. I managed to get a pretty sweet katana to drop earlier which was a massive improvement over the blue sword I had been using for awhile. I took a handful of deaths because I really was not paying nearly as close of attention as I probably should have been. Lately I have been hanging out on the sofa and watching television while playing games, but tonight I opted for a movie. I had yet to see the Amazing Spiderman 2, so I decided to watch it. All in all I think it was a pretty good comic book movie. I’ve never been a massive fan of Spiderman, but I think all kids who read comic books at least know a bit of the storyline and a few of the major villains. It seemed like they did a good enough job at representing both the Green Goblin and Electro. It was good enough to pull my attention from the game a handful of times leading to deaths.

8 Bit Boy

A few days ago I watched the awesome Missy Mojo playing an interesting game on her stream. The game reminded me of a mishmash of a bunch of the late 8 bit Nintendo games as sort of a combination of McKids and Super Mario Brothers 3. 8-Bit Boy pays homage to so many different games and is an absolute steal at only $3.99. I have been playing it off and on, and while I don’t find it in the same league as the various frustration games like Super Meatboy, I find it plenty challenging. I’ve reached a point where the game has started to feel a bit like the special levels in Super Mario World. It isn’t the type of game I can play a lot of in one sitting, but I keep returning to it and whittling away at progress.

There is a certain generic character to the game, that would normally turn me off. The main character is just about as bland as you can get and at the same time looks somewhat like Mario, the character from Adventure Island, and even a little bit Alex Kidd. I think I would have rather the game actually built a strong character for you to play than something that ends up being his amalgam that never is as strong as any of them. The level design kinda feels super generic as well, borrowing elements from a ton of different games. So all of these things would normally turn me off, but I have to say the game play makes up for it in spades. It controls like pretty much the best version of all of the games it is trying to replicate. If you are into that sort of thing, you should totally check it out.

#ArcheAge #FFXIV #8BitBoy

Doomlords and Paladins

October 16, 2014 by Belghast

The Tobold Effect

Yesterday was a strange day because every now and then one of my posts develops a life of its own. I had gotten an email saying that I had a comment waiting in queue. I keep my blog set to moderate new comments because for whatever reason I get a truly phenomenal amount of spam. Every now and then one of them makes it through Akismet and ends up as a real comment. So instead of letting these just sit out there without noticing them, I have my wordpress set to moderate the first comment from a specific poster, and once I have approved them they can comment from that point on freely. So while in wordpress I happened to look at my Jetpack statistics page and saw something weird.

For a moment I thought the stats were completely borked or something, but upon closer inspection I was in fact having what looked to be a spike in readership. When looking through the referrers I saw a name there that I had not seen before. Apparently Tobold created a post with nothing but a link to my “Sandboxes and Sheep” post on ArcheAge, and then bam we were off to the races. While I might be occasionally getting lambasted in his comment stream, I guess there is no such thing as bad publicity? I mean I really did not write that post to be anything than me adding my counter point to the posts that were linked. I was not trying to condemn pvp, but just present an alternate viewpoint to “there are no consequences”.

In any case on an average day I have around 150 readers, and that day I saw that number up up to be like 750ish. Here is hoping that some of them might stick around for awhile, and if so welcome to the new folks who are reading me ramble. I post something new every day, and you get my unfiltered thoughts as on the average morning I start writing around 6 am and write hard and fast for thirty minutes to an hour and produce the post you see each day. I did not necessarily set out that day to write the post I ended up writing, but instead that is what happened to flow out when I put text to screen. The only thing I would add to the comment stream, I was an Alpha player of ArcheAge so while my current character is only level 20, I have more experience than that would denote.

Less Toxic Community

I freely admit that most of my opinion of ArcheAge as a whole comes from early testing of the game. I got into alpha testing back in May when a friend of mine hooked me up with an invite. Overall I think my first impressions were favorable, but as I played it was the community that ended up grinding me down. The griefing was prevalent, and most of it did not involve pvp combat at all to be truthful. I’ve talked about some of my experiences before, but ultimately I detached myself from the game because of the toxic community. With the games launch this was my number one detractor from giving it another shot, that and the fact that at 35 in Alpha I pretty much stalled out due to the constant pvp ganking while trying to quest. Both of which were sad because the game still has quite a bit to offer players of all stripes.

Coming back I have been pleasantly surprised I guess is the best way to put it. While the community is still fairly horrible when compared to say Final Fantasy XIV with their awesome pugging experience… it is at least as good as say World of Warcraft, which is to say it is pretty much the norm for a massively multiplayer game these days. While the public channels do sound a bit like /trade or barrens chat most of the time, they can be pretty easily ignored. I am not sure if simply the worst offenders have moved on to other games, or have at least moved on to bigger content and are no longer in the areas I am in… but in any case I have not actually experienced the non-pvp griefing like I did in alpha.

I think maybe in alpha folks were just like a child testing the limits of their parents will. So many of the things I think folks were doing just because they “could” do it. The fact that most of those early invites were youtubers and streamers probably amplified this toxic nature. There were a few awesome streamers like Kiwi, but also a lot of not so awesome ones whose streams consisted mostly of “watch me abuse these players”. If you went afk in alpha… you were more than likely going to get pushed out of town by a tractor and find yourself dead in the countryside. So it is all of these experiences that have so negatively colored my opinion of the game and left me not wanting to really give it a shot at launch.

Doomlords and Paladins

So I have watched this games progress and played the role of the grumpy curmudgeon as various friends decided to give it a shot. I was fairly happy to ignore it until I realized something. By some quirk almost all of the people I know and care about playing the game seemed to have ended up in the same location. Firstly I noticed that most of the players were on the Naima server, and while I figured a lot of folks would end up playing the “catgirl” faction… it turned out that almost all of them were on West the faction I actually preferred. To make matters worse, I realized that almost everyone happened to be in the same guild. This is the point at which I started to contemplate actually playing the game. What makes it stranger is that several of the groups of friends, don’t actually really know each other. So they all seemed to arrive there independently.

As such I have been trying to look at the game with somewhat fresh eyes, and give it a fair shake where I had not before. The game itself is really fun, but at this point I am not really sure why. I keep flipping back and forth between Paladin and Doomlord, because I am really not sure which one I prefer. Paladin seems to be considerably better for pure survival, but Doomlord has a lot of fun toys. Right now I have both a charge and a death grip attack, which makes me extremely happy. The healing capabilities of Paladin sadly are not terribly useful in combat. Like I can throw a heal over time on myself, but the amount of health it heals versus my hitpoint pool feels insignificant.

What I would love to find is a version of tank that plays like a Shadowknight or a Deathknight, where my attacks basically proc heals. Not sure if such a beast exists and is still at the same time “tanky”. The biggest surprise has been just how willing people are to group up for objectives. The main difference with this game is that there is the ability to send out a group invite to anyone in the vicinity. So many players do that by course before starting an encounter. The negative is that there is no passive tagging system, so the first player to hit anything owns the encounter. I realize this is an older game, but I find it hard to believe that any game would choose active tagging for mobs at this point.

Chief Concerns

My biggest concern for this game is the fact that Trion does not have any real control over it. They run the servers, and can fiddle with bits in their databases… but as far as the client and server code they do not have any access to that at all. They are essentially a third party reseller of this game to the western markets. There are a lot of things that players requested in Alpha that have come out as not being functionally possible, or XL Games was completely unwilling to consider them. There are features that are just requirements for a modern game like the ability to invert the mouse axis, that are missing. I know of at least one friend that simply cannot play the game because of this. At the end of the day, while I have warm fuzzies about Trion… I have to realize this is not their game.

If this changes I might have more hope, and I feel like they are doing their best to accommodate the play style of western gamers. I have listened to a few discussions on this however, and so many of the things that we are requesting… just don’t make sense to XL Games who is entirely focused on the Korean MMO mindset. What I would love to see is for the code to be forked in such a way as Trion had the ability to “improve” the game, but the problem there is that we then get cut off from the main trunk of the tree and it becomes extremely hard to obtain all of the expansion content. The Korean version is considerably further along than the Western version, in that there are even additional races like the Dwarves. It will be interesting to see how things shake out.

#ArcheAge